dual processor vs single

This is a discussion on dual processor vs single within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; just out of curisoty, would it be better to have 2 processors going at 1.4 ghz or 1 processor going ...

It really depends on your application. Generally, on a SMP system, if 1 CPU at a given clock speed is 100%, 2 CPUs are about 170%-190%, not 200%, as you might expect. That measurement, however, is based on benchmarks which are, by all accounts, somewhat contrived. I've not done the benchmarking myself, so I can't say for sure.

The lost performance is a result of the fact that the 2 CPUs share resources, and when there is contention for those resources, one CPU has to wait for the other to finish before it can continue. There is also some software overhead, but it's fairly minor.

That depends on the workload. Whilst one thread is waiting for the HDD, the other can already be doing stuff. This also happens on a single CPU, but because of the large branches, there is some time that you lose whilst changing the thread. There is also the overhead from having to do interrupts from time to time, though that's hardly noticeable.

The real issue here is responsivness(sp?) though. Whilst one CPU (or core) is doing one thing, the other one can servicing your request. If you only had one CPU, you'd notice staggering. This only happens at high loads, but when it does happen, you notice it quite a bit.

I'd say the opposite. Games still rarely use multithreading properly, so the single fast CPU will give you better performance.
By the time games make relevant use of multithreading, a new CPU might be in order anyway.

if anyone happens to know, since this motherboards specs say SATA II hard drives, does this mean it will only take SATA II but not SATA I or will it work wiht SATA I?

btw this server is going to be for hosting website, i might get dualprocessors for the ones i make for hosting game servers. that way i can run 2 game servers on each machine and assign one to each processor

SATA II is backwards compatible. For example, I'm running this computer with a SATA I harddrive, and my motherboard can do SATA II. It's the same as with IDE/ATAPI. It can do some really fast transfer speeds, but it will also accept your old drives.